Month: March 2003

Grueling Schedule

TBOGG reports on President Skeepytime’s week-end getaway.

The Commander In Chief takes his first R&R.

*Wargasm

Could somebody tell Wolf Blitzer to take a cold shower? He has done nothing but rhapsodise all day long about how “never in 30 years of journalism have I experienced such a bombardment, such a loud, nonstop, pounding cacophony of relentless American power, ogawdohgawdohgawd!”

This is why they are called media whores folks. Blitzer is in Kuwait City. He was responding to the same pictures that we all saw this morning. He didn’t see anything we didn’t see. But, like a good soldier he reported it as if he were live on the scene at Armageddon.

In theory, I don’t object to this psy-ops campaign. If people give up before a lot of blood is shed, I couldn’t be happier. But, Wolf Blitzer isn’t faking it. He’s a whore who loves his job.

(And, I would greatly enjoy seeing Wesley Clark grab Aaron Brown’s toupe and shove it in his mouth the next time he makes some unctuous comment about the great job the troops are doing and then calls him Colonel. That’s Supreme Allied Commander to you, Oprah.)

*The term “wargasm” stolen shamelessly from Atrios, who links to some excited little Freeper boyz.

You Want A Piece ‘O Me?

White House political adviser Karl Rove tracked down the president of a conservative group at a friend’s house and subjected him to a telephone tirade over perceived disloyalty. (Steve Pope — AP)

Julia points out this article in the Washington Post that clearly reveals the Bush administration’s only governing principles are loyalty to the President and strong arm tactics. Period.

[…]

As the United States wages war this week following a pair of ultimatums to the United Nations and Iraq, the airwaves and editorial pages of the world have been full of accusations that President Bush and his administration are guilty of coercive and harrying behavior. Even in typically friendly countries, Bush and the United States have been given such labels this week as “arrogant bully” (Britain), “bully boys” (Australia), “big bully” (Russia), “bully Bush” (Kenya), “arrogant” (Turkey) and “capricious” (Canada). Diplomats have accused the administration of “hardball” tactics, “jungle justice” and acting “like thugs.”

At home, where support for the war on Iraq is strong and growing, such complaints of strong-arm tactics by the Bush administration nonetheless have a certain resonance — even among Bush supporters. Though the issues are vastly different, Republican lawmakers and conservative interest groups report similar pressure on allies at home to conform to Bush’s policy wishes.

Although all administrations use political muscle on the opposition, GOP lawmakers and lobbyists say the tactics the Bush administration uses on friends and allies have been uniquely fierce and vindictive. Just as the administration used unbending tactics before the U.N. Security Council with normally allied countries such as Mexico, Germany and France, the Bush White House has calculated that it can overcome domestic adversaries if it tolerates no dissent from its friends.

In recent weeks, the White House has been pushing GOP governors to oust the leadership of the National Governors Association to make the bipartisan group endorse Bush’s views. Interest groups report pressure from the administration — sometimes on groups’ donors — to conform to Bush’s policy views and even to fire dissenters.

Often, companies and their K Street lobbyists endorse ideas they privately oppose or question, according to several longtime Republican lobbyists. The fear is that Bush will either freeze them out of key meetings or hold a grudge that might deprive them of help in other areas, the lobbyists said. When the Electronic Industries Alliance declined to back Bush’s dividend tax cut, the group was frozen out when the White House called its “friends” in the industry to discuss the tax cut, according to White House and business sources.

[…]

Conservative interest groups get similar pressure. When the free-market Club for Growth sent a public letter to the White House to protest White House intervention in GOP primaries for “liberal-leaning Republicans,” the group’s president, Stephen Moore, picked up the phone at a friend’s one evening to receive a screaming tirade from Rove, who had tracked him down. On another occasion when Moore objected to a Bush policy, Rove called Richard Gilder, the Club for Growth’s chairman and a major contributor, to protest.

“I think this monomaniacal call for loyalty is unhealthy,” Moore said. “It’s dangerous to declare anybody who crosses you an enemy for life. It’s shortsighted.” Leaders of three other conservative groups report that their objections to Bush policies have been followed by snubs and, in at least one case, phone calls suggesting the replacement of a critical scholar. “They want sycophants rather than allies,” said the head of one think tank.

Corporations are coming under increasing pressure not just to back Bush, but to hire his allies to represent them in meetings with Republicans. As part of the “K Street Project,” top GOP officials, lawmakers and lobbyists track the political affiliation and contributions of people seeking lobbying jobs.

In a private meeting last week, chief executives from several leading technology firms told Rep. Calvin M. Dooley (Calif.) and other moderate Democrats that they were under heavy pressure to back the Bush tax plan, even though many of them had reservations about it. “There is a perception among some business interests there could be retribution if you don’t play ball on almost every issue that comes up,” Dooley said.

Read

A-Day

Armageddon Day?

I’m watching the Al Jazeera feed on CNN. So are millions of people throughout the middle east.

I feel sick to my stomach.

What do you suppose people watching in Riyadh, Cairo, Amman, Beirut, Islamabad, Damascus and Gaza and elsewhere are feeling?

“The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.”

Courtesy The Propaganda Remix Project

edited 3/21 — corrected stupid error

Oh Fergawdsake

But the government also consulted Parisoula Lampsos, who the Defense Department believes has passed a polygraph examination in support of her claim that she was Hussein’s mistress in Iraq for many years. Lampsos has previously distinguished Hussein from his doubles in more than a dozen cases, one official said, and this time she said he was not the man in the broadcast.

This via Sean-Paul, the hardest working man in Blogtopia. His blog is the place to be for minute by minute analysis. (And here’s to his lovely, understanding wife, the Russian beauty and her cat Barsik.)

Strange Bedfellows

We all know that Michael Kinsley is objectively pro-Saddam so there is no doubt that he deserves to be called a traitor for writing the following today in Slate:

Putting all this together, Bush is asserting the right of the United States to attack any country that may be a threat to it in five years. And the right of the United States to evaluate that risk and respond in its sole discretion. And the right of the president to make that decision on behalf of the United States in his sole discretion. In short, the president can start a war against anyone at any time, and no one has the right to stop him. And presumably other nations and future presidents have that same right. All formal constraints on war-making are officially defunct.

Well, so what? Isn’t this the way the world works anyway? Isn’t it naive and ultimately dangerous to deny that might makes right? Actually, no. Might is important, probably most important, but there are good, practical reasons for even might and right together to defer sometimes to procedure, law, and the judgment of others. Uncertainty is one. If we knew which babies would turn out to be murderous dictators, we could smother them in their cribs. If we knew which babies would turn out to be wise and judicious leaders, we could crown them dictator. In terms of the power he now claims, without significant challenge, George W. Bush is now the closest thing in a long time to dictator of the world. He claims to see the future as clearly as the past. Let’s hope he’s right.

I wonder though, if anyone asked the libertarian warmongers or the Republican patriot police about Joe Conason’s post today pointing out that Charles V. Pena, director of defense policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, is also giving aid and comfort to the enemy when he says:

Ultimately, the path Bush has led the United States down is not about weapons of mass destruction, Security Council Resolution 1441, weapons inspections, or disarmament. It has always been about regime change and using America’s military power to enforce a world order deemed favorable to U.S. interests. Further, the United States is setting a potentially dangerous precedent by engaging in preventative war — not a pre-emptive strike against an imminent threat — based on the uncertainty of not knowing whether a threat might materialize at some point in the future. Now that the administration is where it wanted to be all along and war seems certain, we must hope for a swift and decisive war with a minimum of casualties on both sides.

Anybody have a problem with that? Andy? Glenn?

All American Boys

Salon has a new column called “Homefront” collecting stories from around the land of the free during wartime. The first one is a doozy:

Windham, N.Y., is a ski town, nestled in the Catskills, about two and a half hours from New York City. Main Street, a short, quaint strip that cuts across the bottom of Windham Mountain, is where you can find everything you really need: a post office, a school, a deli, a diner, a gas station, and toward the end, an old restaurant and bar called Madison’s.

Last Sunday, my friend Dawn and I found ourselves at this local haunt after a day of skiing. The place was dead. A lottery game and a golf tournament quietly flickered on the two TV sets. So we started making polite conversation with the bartender, and then the two men sitting next to us.

One was a 40-something, recently laid-off businessman from Little Silver, N.J., a town that’s 15 minutes from where I grew up at the Jersey Shore. The father of two young girls, he had spent the day skiing with his family. His friend was a lawyer, a local, and the father of four, including three girls. They seemed amused to be sitting next to two young, single women from Manhattan, who were both journalists. After they gave us a tip about tax evasion at a local nightclub, they asked us what we thought of the war.

When Dawn and I said we were against the war, the men’s expressions tightened and they looked down at their steaks. They were huge supporters of the war. They argued that if America didn’t disarm Saddam Hussein, no one would, and that America usually acts alone anyway, so who cares what those European bastards think. I’d encountered opinions like theirs many times before. Their attitudes reminded me of many of the men I grew up with — fiercely patriotic, desperate to protect their families from terrorism, bursting with faith in the president.

But when we suggested that Sept. 11 had nothing to do with Iraq, the conversation immediately shifted. Their faces reddened, and they began to talk quickly at the same time, the businessman slapping his hand against the bar to punctuate his outbursts:

“At some point, you have to trust your president! You have to believe that he knows something we don’t!”

“They attacked our country. Now we have to get them!”

“I was down there at the Trade Center. I had a burning piece of paper on my face! Burning. Piece. Of. Paper. On. My. Face!”

The businessman seemed to have forgotten that thousands had perished at the towers — he didn’t mention them, anyway — so consumed was he with his personal vendetta against the Sept. 11 terrorists, I mean, Saddam. In fact, our increasingly irate new friends accused us of supporting Saddam over Bush. When we explained that nobody “supports” Saddam, they went ballistic.

“You know what? You two are the reason why this country’s going down the fucking toilet.”

“This is why I hate you city folks. Fucking city folks. Why don’t you go back to New York? The fucking toilet.”

“Communists. That’s what you are. Communist feminists. Fucking liberals.”

As disturbed as we were, at that point all we could do was laugh. They were behaving so preposterously, each yelling louder than the other one, slamming the bar and sweating. A couple who’d arrived halfway through the conversation looked at them and shook their heads at us sympathetically. We shrugged.

They didn’t appreciate our indifference to their anger. The calmer we were the more enraged they became.

The businessman slowly turned to face us directly.

“How ’bout this. You like those people so much? You like those fuckers so much? How ’bout I throw a veil over your head and drag you by your ponytail out the door? Veil. Over your head. Drag you. By your ponytail,” he said, dissolving into a bizarre, almost tribal chant.

As I said before, these men had seemed familiar to me in some way. But their vitriol genuinely surprised me, especially since the prospect of gagging us with lace and pulling our hair really seemed to turn them on. Their excitement, as much as their hatred, was palpable. We grabbed our coats to leave.

“Hey, so I guess this means we don’t get a kiss, huh!” the lawyer called after us, cackling ecstatically as we slammed the door.

I heard something similar not too long ago here in Southern California. Goose stepping to Rush isn’t confined to the backwoods.

Power To The People

Yglesias approvingly quotes this TAPPED piece about the antiwar movement:

One of the problems with these big marches — impressive as they may be as shows of strength — is that they have little lasting value. The broad anti-globalization/anti-war movement has tended to disdain actual electoral politics, believing it to be corrupt beyond repair (which is, in its way, the ultimate kind of cynicism). But in the long run, the way you win in a democracy is by winning elections, and you win elections by organizing for candidates and helping them raise money.[…]If the people who spend their time organizing and marching would spend even a fraction of that energy and time involving themselves in real electoral politics — not futile, Naderite third-party runs, another form of political narcissism — they could actually punish Bush for what he’s done

Well, yes. The organizers should all work to make sure that Bush is not elected in 2004. Everyone should get involved in electoral politics and try their damnedest to nominate the best possible candidate and they should give money and time to make that happen. Who can argue with that?

But, this isn’t a zero sum game. In fact, for the average citizen, protests often serve as a catalyst for more general political involvement. It is very disheartening to read all these admonitions to this nascent antiwar movement saying that the participants are somehow being unserious.

We have spent years bemoaning the fact that people are politically disinterested, that voters are apathetic, that they don’t feel they have a voice. Now, when rather large numbers of Americans have left the comfort of their homes and their shopping malls to make a sincere statement alongside a bunch of strangers, liberals behave as if it is nothing. Outside of college campuses, the fact is that street protests don’t happen very often in America. Unlike in Europe, general strikes and large political protests are not a big part of our civic life. So, when it happens we should really take a good hard look at why. And we should pay special attention when the people who are protesting are average Joes and Janes who work for a living and have kids and own houses. Because that means that Americans are waking up and starting to pay attention.

Telling these awakened liberals that what they are doing makes no difference and that they should instead volunteer for a candidate and write a check is not exactly inspiring. But, getting citizens involved through a feeling of solidarity with millions of people all around the globe just might have the salutory effect of making a percentage of those protesters decide that they will write a check and walk a precinct in order to elect a candidate they believe in — or to stop the war — or to punish Bush.

People need to feel part of something in order to get involved in politics. And as someone who has volunteered in many a campaign I can tell you that for the last decade it has had all the uplifting inspiration of the Bataan death march. It is work with no satisfaction in the soul or spirit and without that politics becomes nothing more than a duty.

The Republicans have a base of committed true believers and we desperately need some of that too. Telling these newly galvanized Democrats that the only way they can legitimately express themselves is through the ballot box — particularly in this day of manufactured, pre-fab campaigning — is a very self-defeating idea.

We need to get our blood up if we expect to beat back the flag-waving cavaliers of the Republican party. This kind of tepid advice isn’t going to cut it.

Post Script:

Tim Dunlop, erudite as always, on this topic.

Memo To The Democratic Presidential Candidates:

Do not fall for this bullshit:

While Democrats and Republicans closed ranks last night behind the troops, leaders of both parties have shown a willingness to seize on war issues to score political points. Many Republicans hope to chill criticism of Bush and his Iraq policy by sending a clear and early message that they will come down hard on vocal Democratic dissenters, especially those in positions of national prominence, GOP lawmakers said. These Republicans worry that France, Russia and other critics will seize on comments from high-profile Democrats to buttress their case internationally that a preemptive war is unwise and unwarranted.

[…]

Some Republicans see a longer-term political advantage in such applause. They believe Daschle and other Democrats will suffer in the 2004 elections, which may be dominated by themes of national security and terrorism, if voters view them as unpatriotic or soft on defense.

Most national polls show that about two-thirds of Americans back the war against Iraq. “When you are constantly criticizing the president, you are also criticizing the 70 percent of people supporting him,” DeLay said.

National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.) said Democrats will likely “pay a political price” for feeding the perception they opposed disarming and deposing Hussein. That is why most of the Democrats running for president have backed Bush in the conflict, Reynolds said.

Reynolds warned that politicians, such as Daschle, who hail from states Bush won in 2000 are particularly at risk in 2004 if they criticize the president’s Iraq policy. This proves that attacks on Daschle are “so brazenly political and over the top and politically motivated,” said Daschle’s spokeswoman Ranit Schmelzer.

It should be obvious by now that there is no margin in playing Neville Chamberlain to Tom DeLay. Max Cleland proved that nothing will stop them from lying about your record and assassinating your character, no matter what you do. It will gain you nothing to worry about quelling Republican attacks on your patriotism.

If a Democrat wins, he will win despite being smeared as an unpatriotic coward by the Republican Party. Whether he supports the President or doesn’t he will be portrayed as having tried to foil him at every turn. It is pointless to pretend otherwise. Put your head down and barrel along on your own terms.

Remember also, that the entire strategy is designed for only two reasons. The first and foremost is to get Bush legitimately elected, if possible (illegitimately, if not.) The second is to use his wartime popularity to pass their radical domestic agenda under threat of retaliation to moderates who stray. I doubt seriously that they have ever really understood that their bullying and hectoring is what drove Jeffords from the party, but they will likely not be quite as obvious about it as they were with him. It is in the Democratic Party’s interest for Daschle and Pelosi to take some heat right now to give the GOP moderates some cover. This administration may very well overplay their hand (they’re not good at sausage making and Frist is a virgin) so it is worth the Party’s while to hang tough, really tough, on this budget. The presidential candidates can help by giving Daschle and Pelosi some cover as well. It’s going to get bumpy and it would be nice if the Democrats could show a little bit of solidarity here. It would certainly be good for the country.

The Republicans have the strange habit of getting manic and agitated just after they win a battle. They become enraged when they find that winning didn’t result in unconditional surrender by the political opposition. On the day the Washington Post revealed that the president had rallied 71% of the American public, George Will wrote:

Speaking of indiscriminate chaos, many elements of the Democratic Party, including most of its base and many of its most conspicuous leaders, seem deranged, unhinged by the toxic fumes of hatred and contempt they emit for the president. From what does this arise? It cannot just be Florida, the grievance that Democrats, assiduous cultivators of victimhood, love to nurse. No, many Democrats’ problem, which threatens to disqualify their party from presidential responsibilities for a generation, is their incontinent love of snobbery and nostalgia — condescension toward a president they consider ignorant, and a longing for the fun of antiwar days of yore

I don’t know why Republicans have such an overwhelming need for their opponents to cry Uncle and completely capitulate. I suspect it may be from frustration at fighting for an aggressive policy against Soviet communism but never being allowed a final, mano-a-mano battle from which they could derive the masculine satisfaction of dominance and victory. I don’t know. But, it is never enough that they win, they want the Democrats to grovel.

It is more and more clear that those who hated it the most developed a sort of Stockholm Syndrome in which they came to admire many facets of Soviet totalitarianism, one of the most obvious being the efficiency and power offered by the one party state. These people do not believe there is such a thing as the loyal opposition. Opposition is, by definition, disloyal.

Rush has been known to say, “I’d like to keep one liberal around in a museum so every body could see what they look like.” Republicans believe we are the enemy. We cannot win unless we understand this.